Saturday, February 13, 2016

Enough.

This will be my last blog or post to FB about grief,
depression, anxiety and panic attacks. I know that following my journey through
this has been helpful for many, but for reasons I will shortly explain, this
has to stop. I thank all those fans and others who have given and offered
support. You’re good people! And such good people need to be rewarded with big
fat sprawling space operas!

Three years ago I was perfectly happy and satisfied with my
life. The evidence for this to others would be the Transformation trilogy. I
had written 3 books to first draft before I even needed to deliver the first
book. I would wake up in the morning feeling enthusiastic about life, get out
of bed ready to DO stuff! Yeah, I would play about on the internet, but still I
would do my 2,000 words and then get on and enjoy other things. In Crete I
would work, then swim, then drink chilled wine in the sunshine. Everything was
rosy.

Two years and eight months ago my wife, lover, friend and
support, found she was bleeding where she shouldn’t since she had been through
the menopause. Over the ensuing 7 months a worry turned into a nightmare that
just got worse and worse. Every step of the way hopes were killed. Fibroids, we
thought. No, a mass of tumours in one ovary the size of a baby’s head. We tried
the Greek hospital system but after the stress of that came back to England.
Here she was operated on, all her female plumbing removed. It was bowel cancer
that had spread. Stage Four. She started to recover from that first operation
but then began vomiting. Back in hospital they operated again – the bowel
cancer had revealed itself at its source blocking her intestine. They did a
bowel bypass. It failed. She had a choice then: another operation that would
likely result in an ileostomy bag, or death from peritonitis in a couple of
weeks. I never realised then that it really was a choice. She ended up with an ileostomy bag but never really
recovered. Another blockage resulted in her going back into hospital to be fed
through the arm. When it happened again at home she chose to stay at home.
District nurses sprang into action and for them I have nothing but praise.
Caroline then stopped eating and drinking. Nothing would stay down anyway.

On the evening of the 24th January 2014 she was
uncomfortable again. She liked her knees up sometimes, and sometimes her legs
down flat. I moved them for her but nothing would work. I could see the
mottling in the lower parts of them which I suspected was clotting blood. I
suggested she might be more comfortable on her side. She started to move, then
said, ‘Oh no!’ and tried to fling herself from something. She collapsed on the
bed. Eyes wide open. Nothing in them.

I grieved and I thought that as the crying stopped I was
getting over it. I also walked ridiculous amounts – thousands of miles over the
ensuing two years. I lost interest in most other things. Food didn’t interest
me, TV, film, reading and writing. Alcohol steadily ceased to give me any
pleasure – the opposite in fact. I started to become scared of it. Life was
just a purposeless march not to feel miserable. What I did not realise until
just recently was that it had all been too painful so I had suppressed it. This
last year it started to come back at me, most likely instigated by the pressure
of a new relationship. I started to get really anxious, to suffer periods of
depression, to suffer panic attacks. I could only seem to think negatively and
sometimes this was so bad I thought I was going crazy. A couple of times I had
what seemed like psychotic breaks. Perhaps they were.

While in Crete I tried SSRIs (antidepressants) but
immediately did not like the side effects. Many will understand what I mean
when I say they are not great relationship-wise. I then tried meditation and
this eased things a little. Back in England I saw a hypnotherapist, which
helped a little too. She told me to get Rob Kelly’s book ‘Thrive’, which also
helped – positive thinking, positive visualizations, that sort of stuff. I
began working my way through an 8-week mindfulness course. All these helped but
still I was anxious most of the time, having panic attacks, and then I had a 6-day
depression during which I simply did not want to live. I lost 9lbs in weight. I
had more or less decided that I had no choice – I would have to take the SSRIs.
Then I found out about ‘delayed grief’ and ‘complicated grief’.

Everything fitted, all my symptoms, all the circumstances,
all the running away I had done with the ridiculous amounts of exercise, the
way I hurriedly rid myself of any reminders of Caroline. The only answer was to
grieve. When I started looking at photographs I had been unable to look at for
two years I fell apart, crying uncontrollably sometimes. It was awful but,
immediately after that the feeling, the tendency like a lurking monster, of
depression, was gone, and my anxiety diminished. I have been looking at those
photos and crying for 3 weeks now.

But the negative thinking, though it had diminished a lot,
was still there. I suspect it is something I established in myself while
Caroline was dying and in the ensuing two years. I had realised from all the
self-help books that I must tackle it, and I had been, but it’s difficult to do
that when you’re at the bottom of a pit. But now, with perfect timing, along
comes a book by a guy called Richard Carlson ‘Stop Thinking, Start Living’.

Everything that had been inchoate in my mind about
depression and anxiety have solidified on reading it. The answer, as always, is
simple but difficult to apply: stop it, because it is your own thinking that
generates these conditions. You cannot
think your way out of depression and anxiety. In other books they say ‘think
positive’. But positive thoughts are no more valid than negative ones. They say
you can’t stop thinking negatively but must displace that with the positive –
using the old adage ‘don’t think about the elephant’. But it is not true. If
you turn that hypervigilance, which previously you had used to always look for
the bad, towards your own thoughts, you can see a negative thought cycle
starting and simply stop it by thinking of nothing at all. Just shut it down,
and eventually something else will come. Sometimes it will be bad and you have
to shut it down again, and again and again. Carlson’s contention is that
really, at our heart, we are not negative, depressed, unhappy – all of that
shit is learned behaviour. It makes sense. Look at a child. Anyway, it’s work.
It’s work I am doing and its effect is good. Maybe I would not have succeeded if
I had tried this while still carrying a sackload of grief. I don’t know. All I
know is that it is working now.

And finally, here’s why this will be my last post on this
subject. Carlson has a low opinion of psychoanalysis. You do not solve the
problems of depression and anxiety by focusing on them and examining them and
their possible causes in more detail. You just strengthen them by doing that.
This is why people end up regularly visiting a psychiatrist year after year
after year. Stop strengthening those mental pathways. Well I am stopping now.
All of this mental shit is no longer going to be the central fact of my life. I
am not going to keep writing about it and talking about it.

I hope the rest of your path is more gently up hill, where you have and tolerate the support of those around you. Grief is incredibly individual so I wonder if most of our progress is accidental. We look for narrative where there may only be happenstance... but it gets better. (I don't cry uncontrollably on international flights any more :^)

It's good to know you can still feel, but stay aware of simple mental habbits. They can lead in circles or down dark paths. Best wishes, again.

I hope the rest of your path is more gently up hill, where you have and tolerate the support of those around you. Grief is incredibly individual so I wonder if most of our progress is accidental. We look for narrative where there may only be happenstance... but it gets better. (I don't cry uncontrollably on international flights any more :^)

It's good to know you can still feel, but stay aware of simple mental habbits. They can lead in circles or down dark paths. Best wishes, again.

Well done for crossing this bridge, Neal. I know these posts have all been part of your grieving process but i for one am honoured that you have chosen to share them with us.

Reading about Caroline has been incredibly moving and took me back to my mother's passing from the same cancer 10 years ago. Looking back i can just about remember the anger, frustration and depression i felt but it is all very faded and fuzzy. Really all i feel is a strange gratitude that she was at home with her loved ones at the end. Thank you and all the best for the future.

Your books helped me get thro' a difficult time, thanks for that. Escapism, no sheer enjoyment and kicking the grey matter into life again. Rereading some and just re-finished Orbus while on holiday. Glad you survived and reached a better place.............

Hi Neal, this is Guy Haley here. I'm so sorry to hear all this. I've not been keeping up with social media much other than pumping out the requisite amount of self-serving author promotional material, and haven't seen your posts for a while (a couple of years?). I understand part of what you're going through, having suffered severe OCD from my teen years until my early thirties. I kind of made myself better - and it is possible to get better - but such things are crippling while they last. And the loss you've suffered is unimaginable. As horrified to read this as I was, I'm glad to hear you're getting back in the saddle.

Thank you for sharing. Grief is different for each individual. My mother passed away in Dec. 2011 in a completely normal and expected way, the inevitable end of a long life and I still often think, "It's not fair! It's not fair! It's not fair!" but I go on living as she would have expected and wanted me to live. It's the only thing I can do.

Well I don't know what to say really, I was blissfully unaware of what was going on in your life until now. There are no words except Stay strong, not that that will be much comfort. I had a bout of depression when my mom died in 2006. Meds didn't help, in fact they made it worse. 10 years since that dark period, gone in a flash.You have my deepest sympathies and my respect. This sort of thing to post publicly takes guts.